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Sunday, October 9, 2022

JEW SÜSS / POWER (1934)

During his lifetime, this British movie was the major film credit for German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger*, one of the Weimar Intellectuals who spent the war years in Hollywood.  (Another of his novels, from 1933 on the rise of Nazism, THE OPPERMANNS, written when & where it was happening, just republished to considerable acclaim.*)  This one makes a fascinating, if not exactly easy watch.  (Accents, poor British sound recording & subfusc surviving picture element often make it a tough go.)  And director Lothar Mendes, one more alumni from Max Reinhardt’s theater, proves to be no Ernst Lubitsch, William Dieterle or Otto Preminger.  Yet the elaborate production, with a story like The Rothschilds, but seen thru a glass darkly . . . very darkly, is compelling stuff.  Conrad Veidt may be difficult to follow when he speaks, but feelings, motivation & tragic triumph come thru playing an 18th century financial whiz who leads a life outside the Wurtemburg ghetto by helping incoming Duke Karl Alexander with his considerable debts.  Before long, Josef Süss Oppenheimer is both minister and friend.  But at a price, as the Duke is as irresponsible in private as he is in public matters. It will cost Süss his daughter and his affair with a non-Jewish woman.  Yet in letting him become so powerful, the Duke will need a cabal of ‘gentlemen’ to take down this infidel servant, while remaining unaware of just how far Süss is willing to go for revenge.  Producer Michael Balcon lays it on for Mendes in production values & cast.  And if Frank Vosper, also in Hitchcock’s THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH this year, over-indulges as the grasping Duke, the Jewish contingent of Cedric Hardwicke as a psychic rabbi and ironic pal Paul Graetz make up for it.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK: *The NYTimes acclaimed Lion Feuchtwanger’s remarkably prescient 1933 novel two days in a row.  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/books/review/lion-feuchtwanger-oppermanns.html  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/opinion/the-oppermanns-feuchtwanger.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Not to be confused with the anti-Semitic 1940 Nazi-era German film of the same name.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Out the same year (and no doubt an inducement to get this made), THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD/’34.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-house-of-rothschild-1934.html

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